How Does a Pandemic Become a Story? - Analyzing COVID-19 Narratives

Explore how pandemics transform into narratives in this 29-minute lecture from the Foundations & Applications of Humanities Analytics course. Delve into theories of pandemic storytelling, comparing official retrospectives with user-generated content. Examine research questions and data patterns from the #COVID hashtag to understand how COVID-19 stories are constructed. Analyze the narrative structure using fabula and sujet models, and discover key findings about social aspects and outliers in pandemic narratives. Gain insights into digital humanities, cultural analytics, and text analysis methods applied to contemporary events.

How does a pandemic become a story?
How Will We Tell the Story of Covid-19
Theories of Pandemic Narratives
Official Retrospective Culture vs. Mass User Generated Culture
Research Questions
Data: #COVID
Other Basic Patterns
What Do #COVID stories look like?
Model: Narrative - Fabula and Sujet
Finding 1: #COVID
Outlier: High Sociality/Low Corvid
Big Picture